A Professional Kinship? Blurring the Lines Between International Journalism and Advocacy
While Madeleine Bair was a journalism student at the University of California, Berkeley a few years ago, she landed a coveted summer internship in the Colombia bureau of an international news agency. Bair imagined that the bureau staff would be in the field constantly, reporting on dramatic events like the kidnappings and murders of labor activists and indigenous leaders in rural Colombia. But because of resource constraints and security concerns, agency staff weren’t able to travel to many regions where big news was happening.
So instead of learning the ropes of serious field correspondence, she was “stuck in an office, reporting on Shakira,” Bair said. While there, she read More Terrible Than Death, a 2003 account of the violent fallout of the U.S. war on drugs in Colombia. The book is based on the kind of serious, analytical reporting that Bair wanted to do. But its author, Robin Kirk, was a former Human Rights Watch researcher–not a journalist.
Bair returned to Berkeley with an understanding that the career she hoped for was not necessarily going to take place at a traditional news organization. When she graduated with her journalism degree in 2011, she took her skills to an advocacy group in Jamaica, which hired her to produce a series of videos about extrajudicial killings. Later she landed a fellowship at Human Rights Watch, where she worked on a video about government involvement in disappearances in Mexico’s drug war. (I was her supervisor.)
Today, Bair works for WITNESS, an international nongovernmental organization that trains and equips people to use video in their fight for human rights. As curator of the group’s human rights channel on YouTube, she focuses on collecting, verifying, and analyzing citizen-generated content from around the world.142 Though WITNESS is an advocacy group, not a news outlet, when Bair filed her 2013 tax return, she wrote “journalist” under occupation. “Wherever I’ve worked, I’ve always maintained the same integrity or set of standards that I used when reporting for newspapers or public radio and the skills that I honed in journalism school,” she said. “Advocacy journalism has an objective, but that doesn’t mean it’s lesser than some idea of ‘pure’ journalism.”
Whatever you choose to call Bair–journalist or advocate–her career trajectory shows how the idealized boundaries between international reporting and advocacy have blurred over the past decade in the United States. Advocacy groups that once depended on mainstream media to report the findings of their work can now produce and distribute reports directly to global audiences. And some media outlets that once drew a clear line between the work of journalists and the work of advocacy groups are now increasingly using videos, photos, and other materials from local activists or researchers at global groups like Human Rights Watch, where I work.
Digital developments are at the heart of this change: specifically, the Internet’s disruption of traditional economic models in the news business (read: news outlets have slashed funding for foreign reporting) and the explosion of easy-to-use digital devices now widely available to advocates, activists, and ordinary citizens all over the globe. In this environment, new kinds of storytellers are inventing themselves. Many use the same rigorous, fact-based reporting techniques of American journalism, but they’re also using their reporting to actively draw conclusions and lobby for change in ways that traditional journalism in the United States has long shunned.
The change may be most obvious in photography, where a photographer like Marcus Bleasdale has specialized in documenting one of the main concerns of rights groups: the human cost of conflict. Bleasdale’s images have appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek, to name a few. But his primary client and partner over the past few years has been Human Rights Watch.
Wherever he works, Bleasdale said, his methods are classic photojournalism. But he doesn’t call himself a journalist. “There’s absolutely no difference in how I operate if I work for Human Rights Watch, National Geographic, or the New York Times,” Bleasdale told me. The disparity lies in how those organizations use the images he makes, and he strongly prefers working with groups that use his photographs and videos to advocate for change. “I started out wanting to be a photographer that focused on human rights,” he said. “And now I’m a human rights activist that uses photography.” Once he’s made an image, Bleasdale said, his next question is, “Who can you put that photo in front of to make a change?”